OSCAR WILDE.
THE SOUL OF MAN
THE
SOUL OF MAN
UNDER SOCIALISM
BY OSCAR WILDE
With a Preface by ^Robert 1(oss
LONDON
ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS
187 PICCADILLY, \V.
1912
STACK ANNEX
M/JL
A SUPERFLUOUS NOTE OF
EXPLANATION
OSCAR WILDE'S writings require, I
have often observed elsewhere, no
introductions. Even ' De Profundis ' and
' The Ballad of Reading Gaol,' the two more
personal works from his pen, explain them-
selves and thereby defeat the ingenuity of
editors or commentators. Herein lies,
at least one cause of the author's extra-
ordinary popularity in countries separated
from England by wider gulfs than those
of geography and language. The veritable
child of his age, Wilde is one of the least
provincial writers of the nineteenth century.
No special knowledge of that age is
necessary for appreciating either his style
or his humour. He shares the prerogative
of all writers who survive the obloquy or
adulation of their own period. The
204699B
NOTE OF EXPLANATION
universality of his approach to art, litera-
ture, and life, assures for him, I believe,
the attention of posterity, provided that
posterity will have any curiosity concerning
the literary expression of the last century.
I remember being told by a sympathetic
man of letters, shortly after Wilde died in
1900, that none of his books would ever
be read in the future and that none of his
plays would ever be performed again. This
opinion was confirmed by a prominent
public official, whose knowledge of human
nature and the value of literary property
ought to have been extensive. At that
time only one or two of Wilde's published
dramas were to be found in London book-
shops ; some of the other works being
surreptitiously sold in pirated editions.
There was, however, one exception. The
copyright of ' The Soul of Man,' be-
longed to Mr. Arthur Humphreys, from
whom copies could always be obtained.
Not unpardonably I regarded this cir-
cumstance as a symbol of the revived
vi
NOTE OF EXPLANATION
interest in the other works, so soon to
falsify the unfortunate prophecies I have
quoted. In 1901, the year when Salome
was first produced in Berlin, a friend wrote
to me from Russia that he had purchased
in the bazaar at Nijni Novgorod copies
of ' The Soul of Man ' in four different
languages.
With those of a well-known tragic figure
in history it may well be claimed that
Wilde's message and appeal were addressed
to the wider theatre of Europe where they
have met with a response such as has been
accorded to very few other English authors.
In 1907-8 in order to make complete
the Library Edition of Wilde, it was ne-
cessary to lease copyrights not belonging
to myself. Licences, were, of course, ob-
tained from the different owners. But Mr.
Arthur Humphreys most generously per-
mitted me to include ' The Soul of Man '
without the usual quid pro quo. I have only
consented to add this superfluous preface
on condition that he allows me to mention
vii
NOTE OF EXPLANATION
a kindness which must serve as the single
possible excuse for my present intrusion.
Unique among Wilde's writings it is
no exaggeration to say that ' The Soul of
Man' is unique in English literature. At
least there is no more comprehensive essay
with which I am acquainted. Without
being in the least desultory, it touches,
though ever so lightly, almost every
subject on which educated people think
when they think at all. And every
subject is illuminated by a phrase which
haunts the memory. Indeed, many of these
phrases have been boldly appropriated
without acknowledgment or ' socialised '
by some of our leading platform orators. It
may interest some of the author's admirers to
note that in this essay he acknowledges,
what in his previous writings he pretended
to ignore — the potentialities of science.
In the old aesthetic days, under the influence
of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, Wilde
affected to depreciate the debt of humanity
to modern science. Art was more or less to
viii
NOTE OF EXPLANATION
solve everything. Here he recognises that
science, not art, is going to cure con-
sumption and solve the problem of misery.
Indeed, his appreciation of life and its
issues, his perception that art and literature
are component parts of life and not the
whole of life, account in some measure
for the eagerness with which the present
and younger generation read Wilde, when
the fame of his more esteemed contempo-
raries is already a little dimmed and their
canons of art, literature and life are being
readjusted.
That Wilde preaches orthodox Socialism
would, I think, be difficult to maintain. He
appears to be playing with an idea like
the guests of Plato's ' Symposium.' He
unlocks the door of his fantasy when he
says ' Utopia is the one country at which
humanity is always landing.' Nevertheless,
Socialists of the present day have hailed,
I am told, ' The Soul of Man,' as a quite
possible manifesto ; while Tories and
Liberals have not hesitated to quote the
ix
NOTE OF EXPLANATION
severe criticisms on democracy, even in
the House of Commons. In the vindication
of Individualism there is, I venture to
think, a not entirely fantastic answer to
some of the social and economic questions
which disturb every thoughtful member of
the community. The intellectual affinity
between Nietzsche, whom Wilde never read,
and the philosophy of his essay will be
obvious to all students of the great German
thinker.
Wilde used to say that a work of art was
a mirror in which every man saw his own
image. ' The Soul of Man,' like its author,
has many facets, and illustrates the well-
known principle that the angle of incident is
equal to the angle of reflexion.
ROBERT ROSS.
THE SOUL OF MAN.
THE chief advantage that would result
from the establishment of Socialism
is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism
would relieve us from that sordid necessity
of living for others which, in the present
condition of things, presses so hardly upon
almost everybody. In fact, scarcely any
one at all escapes.
Now and then, in the course of the
century, a great man of science, like
Darwin ; a great poet, like Keats ; a fine
critical spirit like M. Renan; a supreme
artist like Flaubert, has been able to isolate
himself, to keep himself out of reach of the
clamorous claims of others, to stand, ' under
1 B
THE SOUL OF MAN
the shelter of the wall,' as Plato puts it,
and so to realise the perfection of what was
in him, to his own incomparable gain, and
to the incomparable and lasting gain of the
whole world. These, however, are ex-
ceptions. The majority of people spoil
their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated
altruism — are forced, indeed, so to spoil
them. They find themselves surrounded
by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by
hideous starvation. It is inevitable that
they should be strongly moved by all this.
The emotions of man are stirred more
quickly than man's intelligence ; and, as
I pointed out some time ago in an article
on the function of criticism, it is much more
easy to have sympathy with suffering than
it is to have sympathy with thought.
Accordingly, with admirable, though mis-
directed intentions, they very seriously
2
and very sentimentally set themselves to
the task of remedying the evils that they
see. But their remedies do not cure the
disease : they merely prolong it. Indeed,
their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of
poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor
alive ; or, in the case of a very advanced
school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution : it is an
aggravation of the difficulty. The proper
aim is to try and reconstruct society on
such a basis that poverty will be impossible.
And the altruistic virtues have really
prevented the carrying out of this aim.
Just as the worst slave-owners were those
who were kind to their slaves, and so
prevented the horror of the system being
realised by those who suffered from it, and
understood by those who contemplated it,
3
THE SOUL OF MAN
so, in the present state of things in
England, the people who do most harm
are the people who try to do most good ;
and at last we have had the spectacle of
men who have really studied the problem
and know the life — educated men who live
in the East End — coming forward and
imploring the community to restrain its
altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence,
and the like. They do so on the ground
that such charity degrades and demoralises.
They are perfectly right. Chanty creates a
multitude of sins.
There is also this to be said. It is
immoral to use private property in order
to alleviate the horrible evils that result
from the institution of private property. It
is both immoral and unfair.
Under Socialism all this will, of course,
be altered. There will be no people living
4
THE SOUL OF MAN
in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up
unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the
midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive
surroundings. The security of society will
not depend, as it does now, on the state
of the weather. If a frost comes we shall
not have a hundred thousand men out of
work, tramping about the streets in a state
of disgusting misery, or whining to their
neighbours for alms, or crowding round
the doors of loathsome shelters to try and
secure a hunch of bread and a night's un-
clean lodging. Each member of the society
will share in the general prosperity and
happiness of the society, and if a frost
comes no one will practically be anything
the worse.
Upon the other hand, Socialism itself
will be of value simply because it will lead
to Individualism.
THE SOUL OF MAN
Socialism, Communism, or whatever one
chooses to call it, by converting private
property into public wealth, and sub-
stituting co-operation for competition, will
restore society to its proper condition of
a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure
the material well-being of each member of
the community. It will, in fact, give Life
its proper basis and its proper environment.
But, for the full development of Life to
its highest mode of perfection, something
more is needed. What is needed is In-
dividualism. If the Socialism is Authori-
tarian ; if there are Governments armed
with economic power as they are now
with political power ; if, in a word, we are
to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last
state of man will be worse than the first.
At present, in consequence of the existence
of private property, a great many people are
6
THE SOUL OF MAN
enabled to develop a certain very limited
amount of Individualism. They are either
under no necessity to work for their living,
or are enabled to choose the sphere of
activity that is really congenial to them,
and gives them pleasure. These are the
poets, the philosophers, the men of science,
the men of culture — in a word, the real
men, the men who have realised them-
selves, and in whom all Humanity gains
a partial realisation. Upon the other hand,
there are a great many people who, having
no private property of their own, and being
always on the brink of sheer starvation,
are compelled to do the work of beasts of
burden, to do work that is quite un-
congenial to them, and to which they are
forced by the peremptory, unreasonable,
degrading Tyranny of want. These are
the poor ; and amongst them there is no
7
THE SOUL OF MAN
grace of manner, or charm of speech, or
civilisation, or culture, or refinement in
pleasures, or joy of life. From their col-
lective force Humanity gains much in
material prosperity. But it is only the
material result that it gains, and the man
who is poor is in himself absolutely of no
importance. He is merely the infinitesimal
atom of a force that, so far from regarding
him, crushes him : indeed, prefers him
crushed, as in that case he is far more
obedient.
Of course, it might be said that the In-
dividualism generated under conditions of
private property is not always, or even as a
rule, of a fine or wonderful type, and that
the poor, if they have not culture and
charm, have still many virtues. Both these
statements would be quite true. The pos-
session of private property is very often
8
THE SOUL OF MAN
extremely demoralising, and that is, of
course, one of the reasons why Socialism
wants to get rid of the institution. In fact,
property is really a nuisance. Some years
ago people went about the country saying
that property has duties. They said it so
often and so tediously that, at last, the
Church has begun to say it. One hears it
now from every pulpit. It is perfectly true.
Property not merely has duties, but has so
many duties that its possession to any large
extent is a bore. It involves endless claims
upon one, endless attention to business,
endless bother. If property had simply
pleasures, we could stand it ; but its duties
make it unbearable. In the interest of the
rich we must get rid of it. The virtues of
the poor may be readily admitted, and are
much to be regretted. We are often told
that the poor are grateful for charity. Some
9
THE SOUL OF MAN
of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst
the poor are never grateful. They are un-
grateful, discontented, disobedient, and re-
bellious. They are quite right to be so.
Charity they feel to be a ridiculously in-
adequate mode of partial restitution, or a
sentimental dole, usually accompanied by
some impertinent attempt on the part of
the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their
private lives. Why should they be grateful
for the crumbs that fall from the rich man's
table ? They should be seated at the board,
and are beginning to know it. As for being
discontented, a man who would not be dis-
contented with such surroundings and such
a low mode of life would be a perfect brute.
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who
has read history, is man's original virtue.
It is through disobedience that progress has
been made, through disobedience and through
XO
THE SOUL OF MAN
rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised
for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift
to the poor is both grotesque and insulting.
It is like advising a man who is starving to
eat less. For a town or country labourer to
practise thrift would be absolutely immoral.
M an should not be ready to show that he
can live like a badly-fed animal. He should
decline to live like that, and should either
steal or go on the rates, which is considered
by many to be a form of stealing. As for
begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but
it is finer to take than to beg. No : a poor
man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discon-
tented, and rebellious, is probably a real
personality, and has much in him. He is at
any rate a healthy protest. As for the
virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course,
but one cannot possibly admire them.
They have made private terms with the
11
THE SOUL OF MAN
enemy, and sold their birthright for very
bad pottage. They must also be extra-
ordinarily stupid. I can quite understand a
man accepting laws that protect private
property, and admit of its accumulation, as
long as he himself is able under those con -
ditions to realise some form of beautiful
and intellectual life. But it is almost in-
credible to me how a man whose life is
marred and made hideous by such laws can
possibly acquiesce in their continuance.
However, the explanation is not really
difficult to find. It is simply this. Misery
and poverty are so absolutely degrading,
and exercise such a paralysing effect over
the nature of men, that no class is ever
really conscious of its own suffering. They
have to be told of it by other people, and
they often entirely disbelieve them. What
is said by great employers of labour against
12
THE SOUL OF MAN
agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators
are a set of interfering, meddling people,
who come down to some perfectly con-
tented class of the community, and sow
the seeds of discontent amongst them.
That is the reason why agitators are so
absolutely necessary. Without them, in our
incomplete state, there would be no advance
towards civilisation. Slavery was put down
in America, not in consequence of any action
on the part of the slaves, or even any express
desire on their part that they should be
free. It was put down entirely through the
grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators
in Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves
themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had
anything to do with the question really.
It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who
set the torch alight, who began the whole
thing. And it is curious to note that from
13
THE SOUL OF MAN
the slaves themselves they received, not
merely very little assistance, but hardly any
sympathy even ; and when at the close of
the war the slaves found themselves free,
found themselves indeed so absolutely free
that they were free to starve, many of them
bitterly regretted the new state of things.
To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the
whole of the French Revolution is not that
Marie Antoinette was killed for being a
queen, but that the starved peasant of the
Vendee voluntarily went out to die for the
hideous cause of feudalism.
It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian
Socialism will do. For while under the
present system a very large number of
people can lead lives of a certain amount of
freedom and expression and happiness, under
an industrial-barrack system, or a system of
economic tyranny, nobody would be able to
14
THE SOUL OF MAN
have any such freedom at all. It is to be
regretted that a portion of our community
should be practically in slavery, but to
propose to solve the problem by enslaving
the entire community is childish. Every
man must be left quite free to choose his
own work. No form of compulsion must
be exercised over him. If there is, his work
will not be good for him, will not be good
in itself, and will not be good for others.
And by work I simply mean activity of any
kind.
I hardly think that any Socialist, now-
adays, would seriously propose that an in-
spector should call every morning at each
house to see that each citizen rose up
and did manual labour for eight hours.
Humanity has got beyond that stage, and
reserves such a form of life for the people
whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses
15
THE SOUL OF MAN
to call criminals. But I confess that many
of the socialistic views that I have come
across seem to me to be tainted with ideas
of authority, if not of actual compulsion.
Of course, authority and compulsion are out
of the question. All association must be
quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary
associations that man is fine.
But it may be asked how Individualism,
which is now more or less dependent on the
existence of private property for its develop-
ment, will benefit by the abolition of such
private property. The answer is very simple.
It is true that, under existing conditions, a
few men who have had private means of
their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning,
Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have
been able to realise their personality more or
less completely. Not one of these men ever
did a single day's work for hire. They were
16
THE SOUL OF MAN
relieved from poverty. They had an im-
mense advantage. The question is whether
it would be for the good of Individualism
that such an advantage should be taken
away. Let us suppose that it is taken away.
What happens then to Individualism ? How
will it benefit ?
It will benefit in this way. Under the
new conditions Individualism will be far
freer, far finer, and far more intensified
than it is now. I am not talking of the
great imaginatively-realised Individualism of
such poets as I have mentioned, but of the
great actual Individualism latent and poten-
tial in mankind generally. For the recogni-
tion of private property has really harmed
Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing
a man with what he possesses. It has led
Individualism entirely astray. It has made
gain, not growth, its aim. So that man
17 c
THE SOUL OF MAN
thought that the important thing was to
have, and did not know that the important
thing is to be. The true perfection of man
lies, not in what man has, but in what man
is. Private property has crushed true In-
dividualism, and set up an Individualism that
is false. It has debarred one part of the
community from being individual by starving
them. It has debarred the other part of the
community from being individual by putting
them on the wrong road, and encumbering
them. Indeed, so completely has man's
personality been absorbed by his possessions
that the English law has always treated
offences against a man's property with far
more severity than offences against his per-
son, and property is still the test of com-
plete citizenship. The industry necessary
for the making of money is also very de-
moralising. In a community like ours,
18
THE SOUL OF MAN
where property confers immense distinction,
social position, honour, respect, titles, and
other pleasant things of the kind, man,
being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim
to accumulate this property, and goes on
wearily and tediously accumulating it long
after he has got far more than he wants, or
can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of.
Man will kill himself by overwork in order
to secure property, and really, considering
the enormous advantages that property
brings, one is hardly surprised. One's regret
is that society should be constructed on such
a basis that man has been forced into a
groove in which he cannot freely develop
what is wonderful, and fascinating, and de-
lightful in him — in which, in fact, he misses
the true pleasure and joy of living. He is
also, under existing conditions, very insecure.
An enormously wealthy merchant may be —
19
THE SOUL OF MAN
often is — at every moment of his life at the
mercy of things that are not under his control.
If the wind blows an extra point or so, or
the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial
thing happens, his ship may go down, his
speculations may go wrong, and he finds
himself a poor man, with his social position
quite gone. Now, nothing should be able
to harm a man except himself. Nothing
should be able to rob a man at all. What a
man really has, is what is in him. What is
outside of him should be a matter of no im-
portance.
With the abolition of private property,
then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy
Individualism. Nobody will waste his life
in accumulating things, and the symbols for
things. One will live. To live is the rarest
thing in the world. Most people exist, that
is all.
20
THE SOUL OF MAN
It is a question whether we have ever
seen the full expression of a personality,
except on the imaginative plane of art.
In action, we never have. Cassar, says
Mommsen, was the complete and perfect
man. But how tragically insecure was
Caesar ! Wherever there is a man who
exercises authority, there is a man who
resists authority. Caesar was very perfect,
but his perfection travelled by too dangerous
a road. Marcus Aurelius was the perfect
man, says Renan. Yes ; the great emperor
was a perfect man. But how intolerable
were the endless claims upon him ! He
staggered under the burden of the empire.
He was conscious how inadequate one man
was to bear the weight of that Titan and
too vast orb. What I mean by a perfect
man is one who develops under perfect con-
ditions; one who is not wounded, or worried
21
THE SOUL OF MAN
or maimed, or in danger. Most person-
alities have been obliged to be rebels. Half
their strength has been wasted in friction.
Byron's personality, for instance, was ter-
ribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity,
and hypocrisy and Philistinism of the
English. Such battles do not always inten-
sify strength ; they often exaggerate weak-
ness. Byron was never able to give us
what he might have given us. Shelley
escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of
England as soon as possible. But he was
not so well known. If the English had
realised what a great poet he really was,
they would have fallen on him with tooth
and nail, and made his life as unbearable
to him as they possibly could. But he
was not a remarkable figure in society, and
consequently he escaped, to a certain degree.
Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is
22
THE SOUL OF MAN
sometimes too strong. The note of the
perfect personality is not rebellion, but
peace.
It will be a marvellous thing — the true
personality of man — when we see it. It
will grow naturally and simply, flower-like,
or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord.
It will never argue or dispute. It will not
prove things. It will know everything.
And yet it will not busy itself about know-
ledge. It will have wisdom. Its value
will not be measured by material things.
It will have nothing. And yet it will have
everything, and whatever one takes from it,
it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not
be always meddling with others, or asking
them to be like itself. It will love them
because they will be different. And yet
while it will not meddle with others, it
will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us,
23
THE SOUL OF MAN
by being what it is. The personality of
man will be very wonderful. It will be as
wonderful as the personality of a child.
In its development it will be assisted
by Christianity, if men desire that ; but if
men do not desire that, it will develop
none the less surely. For it will not worry
itself about the past, nor care whether
things happened or did not happen. Nor
will it admit any laws but its own laws ;
nor any authority but its own authority.
Yet it will love those who sought to inten-
sify it, and speak often of them. And of
these Christ was one.
' Know thyself ' was written over the
portal of the antique world. Over the
portal of the new world, * Be thyself ' shall
be written. And the message of Christ to
man was simply ' Be thyself.' That is the
secret of Christ.
24
THE SOUL OF MAN
When Jesus talks about the poor he
simply means personalities, just as when
he talks about the rich he simply means
people who have not developed their person-
alities. Jesus moved in a community that
allowed the accumulation of private pro-
perty just as ours does, and the gospel that
he preached was, not that in such a com-
munity it is an advantage for a man to
live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear
ragged, unwholesome clothes, to sleep in
horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a dis-
advantage for a man to live under healthy,
pleasant, and decent conditions. Such a
view would have been wrong there and
then, and would, of course, be still more
wrong now and in England ; for as man
moves northward the material necessities of
life become of more vital importance, and
our society is infinitely more complex, and
25
displays far greater extremes of luxury and
pauperism than any society of the antique
world. What Jesus meant, was this. He
said to man, * You have a wonderful person-
ality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don't
imagine that your perfection lies in accu-
mulating or possessing external things.
Your affection is inside of you. If only
you could realise that, you would not want
to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen
from a man. Real riches cannot. In the
treasury- house of your soul, there are infi-
nitely precious things, that may not be taken
from you. And so, try to so shape your
life that external things will not harm you.
And try also to get rid of personal pro-
perty. It involves sordid preoccupation,
endless industry, continual wrong. Per-
sonal property hinders Individualism at
every step.' It is to be noted that Jesus
26
THE SOUL OF MAN
never says that impoverished people are
necessarily good, or wealthy people neces-
sarily bad. That would not have been
true. Wealthy people are, as a class, better
than impoverished people, more moral, more
intellectual, more well-behaved. There is
only one class in the community that thinks
more about money than the rich, and that
is the poor. The poor can think of nothing
else. That is the misery of being poor.
What Jesus does say, is that man reaches
his perfection, not through what he has, not
even through what he does, but entirely
through what he is. And so the wealthy
young man who comes to Jesus is repre-
sented as a thoroughly good citizen, who
has broken none of the laws of his state,
none of the commandments of his religion.
He is quite respectable, in the ordinary
sense of that extraordinary word. Jesus
27
THE SOUL OF MAN
says to him, * You should give up private
property. It hinders you from realising
your perfection. It is a drag upon you.
It is a burden. Your personality does not
need it. It is within you, and not outside
of you, that you will find what you really
are, and what you really want.' To his own
friends he says the same thing. He tells
them to be themselves, and not to be always
worrying about other things. What do
other things matter ? Man is complete in
himself. When they go into the world,
the world will disagree with them. That
is inevitable. The world hates Individu-
alism. But that is not to trouble them.
They are to be calm and self-centred. If
a man takes their cloak, they are to give
him their coat, just to show that material
things are of no importance. If people
abuse them, they are not to answer back.
28
THE SOUL OF MAN
What does it signify ? The things people
say of a man do not alter a man. He is
what he is. Public opinion is of no value
whatsoever. Even if people employ actual
violence, they are not to be violent in turn.
That would be to fall to the same low level.
After all, even in prison, a man can be quite
free. His soul can be free. His personality
can be untroubled. He can be at peace.
And, above all things, they are not to inter-
fere with other people or judge them in any
way. Personality is a very mysterious thing.
A man cannot always be estimated by what
he does. He may keep the law, and yet be
worthless. He may break the law, and yet
be fine. He may be bad, without ever
doing anything bad. He may commit a sin
against society, and yet realise through that
sin his true perfection.
There was a woman who was taken in
29
THE SOUL OF MAN
adultery. We are not told the history of
her love, but that love must have been very
great ; for Jesus said that her sins were for-
given her, not because she repented, but
because her love was so intense and won-
derful. Later on, a short time before his
death, as he sat at a feast, the woman came
in and poured costly perfumes on his hair.
His friends tried to interfere with her, and
said that it was extravagance, and that the
money that the perfume cost should have
been expended on charitable relief of people
in want, or something of that kind. Jesus
did not accept that view. He pointed out
that the material needs of Man were great
and very permanent, but that the spiritual
needs of Man were greater still, and that in
one divine moment, and by selecting its
own mode of expression, a personality
might make itself perfect. The world
30
THE SOUL OF MAN
worships the woman, even now, as a
saint.
Yes ; there are suggestive things in In-
dividualism. Socialism annihilates family
life, for instance. With the abolition of
private property, marriage in its present
form must disappear. This is part of the
programme. Individualism accepts this and
makes it fine. It converts the abolition of
legal restraint into a form of freedom that
will help the full development of per-
sonality, and make the love of man and
woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and
more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He re-
jected the claims of family life, although
they existed in his day and community in a
very marked form. * Who is my mother ?
Who are my brothers ? ' he said, when he
was told that they wished to speak to him.
When one of his followers asked leave to
31
THE SOUL OF MAN
go and bury his father, l Let the dead bury
the dead,' was his terrible answer. He
would allow no claim whatsoever to be
made on personality.
And so he who would lead a Christlike
life is he who is perfectly and absolutely
himself. He may be a great poet, or a
great man of science; or a young student
at a University, or one who watches sheep
upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like
Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like
Spinoza ; or a child who plays in a garden,
or a fisherman who throws his net into the
sea. It does not matter what he is, as long
as he realises the perfection of the soul that
is within him. All imitation in morals and
in life is wrong. Through the streets of
Jerusalem at the present day crawls one
who is mad and carries a wooden cross on
his shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives
32
THE SOUL OF MAN
that are marred by imitation. Father
Damien was Christlike when he went out
to live with the lepers, because in such ser-
vice he realised fully what was best in him.
But he was not more Christlike than
Wagner when he realised his soul in music ;
or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in
song. There is no one type for man. There
are as many perfections as there are im-
perfect men. And while to the claims of
charity a man may yield and yet be free,
to the claims of conformity no man may
yield and remain free at all.
Individualism, then, is what through
Socialism we are to attain. As a natural
result the State must give up all idea of
government. It must give it up because,
as a wise man once said many centuries
before Christ, there is such a thing as leav-
ing mankind alone ; there is no such thing
33 p
THE SOUL OF MAN
as governing mankind. All modes of
government are failures. Despotism is
unjust to everybody, including the despot,
who was probably made for better things.
Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and
ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High
hopes were once formed of democracy ; but
democracy means simply the bludgeoning
of the people by the people for the people.
It has been found out. I must say that it
was high time, for all authority is quite
degrading. It degrades those who exercise
it, and degrades those over whom it is exer-
cised. When it is violently, grossly, and
cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by
creating, or at any rate bringing out, the
spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to
kill it. When it is used with a certain
amount of kindness, and accompanied by
prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoral-
34
THE SOUL OF MAN
ising. People, in that case, are less con-
scious of the horrible pressure that is being
put on them, and so go through their lives
in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted
animals, without ever realising that they are
probably thinking other people's thoughts,
living by other people's standards, wearing
practically what one may call other people's
second-hand clothes, and never being them-
selves for a single moment. ' He who
would be free,' says a fine thinker, 'must
not conform.' And authority, by bribing
people to conform, produces a very gross
kind of over-fed barbarism amongst us.
With authority, punishment will pass
away. This will be a great gain — a gain, in
fact, of incalculable value. As one reads
history, not in the expurgated editions
written for schoolboys and passmen, but in
the original authorities of each time, one is
35
THE SOUL OF MAN
absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that
the wicked have committed, but by the
punishments that the good have inflicted ;
and a community is infinitely more bru-
talised by the habitual employment of
punishment, than it is by the occurrence of
crime. It obviously follows that the more
punishment is inflicted the more crime is
produced, and most modern legislation has
clearly recognised this, and has made it its
task to diminish punishment as far as it
thinks it can. Wherever it has really
diminished it, the results have always been
extremely good. The less punishment, the
less crime. When there is no punishment
at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if
it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a
very distressing form of dementia, to be
cured by care and kindness. For what are
called criminals nowadays are not criminals
36
THE SOUL OF MAN
at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the
parent of modern crime. That indeed is
the reason why our criminals are, as a
class, so absolutely uninteresting from any
psychological point of view. They are not
marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins.
They are merely what ordinary, respectable,
commonplace people would be if they had
not got enough to eat. When private
property is abolished there will be no
necessity for crime, no demand for it ; it
will cease to exist. Of course, all crimes
are not crimes against property, though
such are the crimes that the English law,
valuing what a man has more than what a
man is, punishes with the harshest and most
horrible severity (if we except the crime of
murder, and regard deatli as worse than
penal servitude, a point on which our
criminals, I believe, disagree). But though
37
THE SOUL OF MAN
a crime may not be against property, it may
spring from the misery and rage and de-
pression produced by our wrong system of
property-holding, and so, when that system
is abolished, will disappear. When each
member of the community has sufficient for
his wants, and is not interfered with by his
neighbour, it will not be an object of any
interest to him to interfere with anyone
else. Jealousy, which is an extraordinary
source of crime in modern life, is an
emotion closely bound up with our con-
ceptions of property, and under Socialism
and Individualism will die out. It is re-
markable that in communistic tribes
jealousy is entirely unknown.
Now as the State is not to govern, it
may be asked what the State is to do. The
State is to be a voluntary association that
will organize labour, and be the manufac-
38
THE SOUL OF MAN
turer and distributor of necessary commo-
dities. The State is to make what is useful.
The individual is to make what is beautiful.
And as I have mentioned the word labour,
I cannot help saying that a great deal of
nonsense is being written and talked now-
adays about the dignity of manual labour.
There is nothing necessarily dignified about
manual labour at all, and most of it is
absolutely degrading. It is mentally and
morally injurious to man to do anything in
which he does not find pleasure, and many
forms of labour are quite pleas ureless
activities, and should be regarded as such.
To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours
on a day when the east wind is blowing is
a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with
mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to
me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy
would be appalling. Man is made for
39
THE SOUL OF MAN
something better than disturbing dirt. All
work of that kind should be done by a
machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so.
Up to the present, man has been, to a
certain extent, the slave of machinery, and
there is something tragic in the fact that as
soon as man had invented a machine to do
his work he began to starve. This, how-
ever, is, of course, the result of our
property system and our system of com-
petition. One man owns a machine which
does the work of five hundred men. Five
hundred men are, in consequence, thrown
out of employment, and, having no work to
do, become hungry and take to thieving.
The one man secures the produce of the
machine and keeps it, and has five hundred
times as much as he should have, and
probably, which is of much more impor-
40
THE SOUL OF MAN
tance, a great deal more than he really
wants. Were that machine the property of
all, everybody would benefit by it. It
would be an immense advantage to the
community. All unintellectual labour, all
monotonous, dull labour, all labour that
deals with dreadful things, and involves
unpleasant conditions, must be done by
machinery. Machinery must work for us in
coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and
be the stoker of steamers, and clean the
streets, and run messages on wet days, and
do anything that is tedious or distressing.
At present machinery competes against
man. Under proper conditions machinery
will serve man. There is no doubt at all
that this is the future of machinery; and just
as trees grow while the country gentleman
is asleep, so while Humanity will be
amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure
41
THE SOUL OF MAN
—which, and not labour, is the aim of man
— or making beautiful things, or reading
beautiful things, or simply contemplating
the world with admiration and delight,
machinery will be doing all the necessary
and unpleasant work. The fact is, that
civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks
were quite right there. Unless there are
slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting
work, culture and contemplation become
almost impossible. Human slavery is
wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On
mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the
machine, the future of the world depends.
And when scientific men are no longer
called upon to go down to a depressing
East End and distribute bad cocoa and
worse blankets to starving people, they will
have delightful leisure in which to devise
wonderful and marvellous things for their
42
THE SOUL OF MAN
own joy and the joy of every one else.
There will be great storages of force for
every city, and for every house if required,
and this force man will convert into heat,
light, or motion, according to his needs. Is
this Utopian ? A map of the world that
does not include Utopia is not worth even
glancing at, for it leaves out the one country
at which Humanity is always landing.
And when Humanity lands there, it looks
out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.
Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Now, I have said that the community by
means of organization of machinery will
supply the useful things, and that the
beautiful things will be made by the indivi-
dual. This is not merely necessary, but it is
the only possible way by which we can get
either the one or the other. An individual
who has to make things for the use of others,
43
THE SOUL OF MAN
and with reference to their wants and their
wishes, does not work with interest, and con-
sequently cannot put into his work what is
best in him. Upon the other hand, when-
ever a community or a powerful section of a
community, or a government of any kind,
attempts to dictate to the artist what he is
to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or be-
comes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low
and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is
the unique result of a unique temperament.
Its beauty comes from the fact that the
author is what he is. It has nothing to do
with the fact that other people want what
they want. Indeed, the moment that an
artist takes notice of what other people want,
and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to
be an artist, and becomes a dull or an
amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest
tradesman. He has no further claim to be
44
THE SOUL OF MAN
considered as an artist. Art is the most
intense mode of Individualism that the world
has known. I am inclined to say that it is
the only real mode of Individualism that the
world has known. Crime, which, under
certain conditions, may seem to have created
Individualism, must take cognisance of other
people and interfere with them. It belongs
to the sphere of action. But alone, without
any reference to his neighbours, without any
interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful
thing ; and if he does not do it solely for his
own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
And it is to be noted that it is the fact
that Art is this intense form of Individual-
ism that makes the public try to exercise
over it an authority that is as immoral as
it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is con-
temptible. It is not quite their fault. The
public has always, and in every age, been
45
THE SOUL OF MAN
badly brought up. They are continually
asking Art to be popular, to please their
want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity,
to tell them what they have been told before,
to show them what they ought to be tired of
seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy
after eating too much, and to distract their
thoughts when they are wearied of their own
stupidity. Now Art should never try to be
popular. The public should try to make
itself artistic. There is a very wide difference.
If a man of science were told that the results
of his experiments, and the conclusions that
he arrived at, should be of such a character
that they would not upset the received
popular notions on the subject, or disturb
popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of
people who knew nothing about science ; if a
philosopher were told that he had a perfect
right to speculate in the highest spheres of
46
THE SOUL OF MAN
thought, provided that he arrived at the same
conclusions as were held by those who had
never thought in any sphere at all — well,
nowadays the man of science and the philo-
sopher would be considerably amused. Yet
it is really a very few years since both philo-
sophy and science were subjected to brutal
popular control, to authority in fact — the
authority of either the general ignorance of
the community, or the terror and greed for
power of an ecclesiastical or governmental
class. Of course, we have to a very great
extent got rid of any attempt on the part
of the community, or the Church, or the
Government, to interfere with the indivi-
dualism of speculative thought, but the
attempt to interfere with the individualism
of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it
does more than linger ; it is aggressive,
offensive, and brutalising.
47
THE SOUL OF MAN
In England, the arts that have escaped
best are the arts in which the public take
no interest. Poetry is an instance of what
I mean. We have been able to have fine
poetry in England because the public do not
read it, and consequently do not influence it.
The public like to insult poets because they
are individual, but once they have insulted
them, they leave them alone. In the case
of the novel and the drama, arts in which
the public do take an interest, the result of
the exercise of popular authority has been
absolutely ridiculous. No country produces
such badly-written fiction, such tedious,
common work in the novel form, such silly,
vulgar plays as England. It must neces-
sarily be so. The popular standard is of
such a character that no artist can get to it.
It is at once too easy and too difficult to be
a popular novelist. It is too easy, because
48
THE SOUL OF MAN
the requirements of the public as far as plot,
style, psychology, treatment of life, and
treatment of literature are concerned are
within the reach of the very meanest capacity
and the most uncultivated mind. It is too
difficult, because to meet such requirements
the artist would have to do violence to his
temperament, would have to write not for
the artistic joy of writing, but for the amuse-
ment of half-educated people, and so would
have to suppress his individualism, forget his
culture, annihilate his style, and surrender
everything that is valuable in him. In the
case of the drama, things are a little better :
the theatre-going public like the obvious, it
is true, but they do not like the tedious ;
and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two
most popular forms, are distinct forms of art.
Delightful work may be produced under
burlesque and farcical conditions, and in
49 E
THE SOUL OF MAN
work of this kind the artist in England is
allowed very great freedom. It is when one
comes to the higher forms of the drama that
the result of popular control is seen. The
one thing that the public dislike is novelty.
Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of
art is extremely distasteful to the public ;
and yet the vitality and progress of art
depend in a large measure on the continual
extension of subject-matter. The public
dislike novelty because they are afraid of it.
It represents to them a mode of Individual-
ism, an assertion on the part of the artist
that he selects his own subject, and treats it
as he chooses. The public are quite right in
their attitude. Art is Individualism, and
Individualism is a disturbing and disinte-
grating force. Therein lies its immense
value. For what it seeks to disturb is
monotony of type, slavery of custom,
50
THE SOUL OF MAN
tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man
to the level of a machine. In Art, the
public accept what has been, because they
cannot alter it, not because they appreciate
it. They swallow their classics whole, and
never taste them. They endure them as the
inevitable, and as they cannot mar them,
they mouth about them. Strangely enough,
or not strangely, according to one's own
views, this acceptance of the classics does a
great deal of harm. The uncritical admira-
tion of the Bible and Shakespeare in England
is an instance of what I mean. With regard
to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical
authority enter into the matter, so that I
need not dwell upon the point.
But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite
obvious that the public really see neither the
beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they
saw the beauties, they would not object to
51
THE SOUL OF MAN
the development of the drama ; and if they
saw the defects, they would not object to the
development of the drama either. The fact
is, the public make use of the classics of a
country as a means of checking the progress
of Art. They degrade the classics into
authorities. They use them as bludgeons
for preventing the free expression of Beauty
in new forms. They are always asking a
writer why he does not write like somebody
else, or a painter why he does not paint like
somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact
that if either of them did anything of the
kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh
mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to
them, and whenever it appears they get so
angry and bewildered that they always use
two stupid expressions — one is that the work
of art is grossly unintelligible ; the other,
that the work of art is grossly immoral.
52
THE SOUL OF MAN
What they mean by these words seems to me
to be this. When they say a work is grossly
unintelligible, they mean that the artist has
said or made a beautiful thing that is new ;
when they describe a work as grossly im-
moral, they mean that the artist has said or
made a beautiful thing that is true. The
former expression has reference to style ; the
latter to subject-matter. But they probably
use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary
mob will use ready-made paving-stones.
There is not a single real poet or prose-
writer of this century, for instance, on whom
the British public have not solemnly con-
ferred diplomas of immorality, and these
diplomas practically take the place, with us,
of what in France is the formal recognition
of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately
make the establishment of such an institution
quite unnecessary in England. Of course, the
53
THE SOUL OF MAN
public are very reckless in their use of the
word. That they should have called Words-
worth an immoral poet, was only to be ex-
pected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that
they should have called Charles Kingsley an
immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley 's
prose was not of a very fine quality. Still,
there is the word, and they use it as best
they can. An artist is, of course, not dis-
turbed by it. The true artist is a man who
believes absolutely in himself, because he is
absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if
an artist produced a work of art in England
that immediately on its appearance was
recognised by the public, through their
medium, which is the public press, as a work
that was quite intelligible and highly moral,
he would begin seriously to question whether
in its creation he had really been himself at
all, and consequently whether the work was
54
THE SOUL OF MAN
not quite unworthy of him, and either of a
thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic
value whatsoever.
Perhaps, however, I have wronged the
public in limiting them to such words as
* immoral,' ' unintelligible,' * exotic,' and
* unhealthy.' There is one other word that
they use. That word is ' morbid.' They
do not use it often. The meaning of the
word is so simple that they are afraid of
using it. Still, they use it sometimes, and,
now and then, one comes across it in
popular newspapers. It is, of course, a
ridiculous word to apply to a work of art.
For what is morbidity but a mood of emo-
tion or a mode of thought that one cannot
express ? The public are all morbid, be-
cause the public can never find expression
for anything. The artist is never morbid.
He expresses everything. He stands out-
55
THE SOUL OF MAN
side his subject, and through its medium
produces incomparable and artistic effects.
To call an artist morbid because he deals
with morbidity as his subject-matter is as
silly as if one called Shakespeare mad be-
cause he wrote ' King Lear.'
On the whole, an artist in England
gains something by being attacked. His
individuality is intensified. He becomes
more completely himself. Of course, the
attacks are very gross, very impertinent,
and very contemptible. But then no artist
expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style
from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity
and stupidity are two very vivid facts in
modern life. One regrets them, naturally.
But there they are. They are subjects for
study, like everything else. And it is only
fair to state, with regard to modern jour-
nalists, that they always apologise to one
56
THE SOUL OF MAN
in private for what they have written
against one in public.
Within the last few years two other
adjectives, it may be mentioned, have been
added to the very limited vocabulary of
art-abuse that is at the disposal of the
public. One is the word ' unhealthy,' the
the other is the word ' exotic.' The latter
merely expresses the rage of the momen-
tary mushroom against the immortal, en-
trancing, and exquisitely lovely orchid. It
is a tribute, but a tribute of no importance.
The word ' unhealthy,' however, admits of
analysis. It is a rather interesting word.
In fact, it is so interesting that the people
who use it do not know what it means.
What does it mean ? What is a healthy
or an unhealthy work of art ? All terms
that one applies to a work of art, provided
that one applies them rationally, have re-
57
THE SOUL OF MAN
ference to either its style or its subject, or
to both together. From the point of view
of style, a healthy work of art is one
whose style recognises the beauty of the
material it employs, be that material one
of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory,
and uses that beauty as a factor in producing
the aesthetic effect. From the point of view
of subject, a healthy work of art is one the
choice of whose subject is conditioned by
the temperament of the artist, and comes
directly out of it. In fine, a healthy work
of art is one that has both perfection and
personality. Of course, form and substance
cannot be separated in a work of art ;
they are always one. But for purposes of
analysis, and setting the wholeness of
aesthetic impression aside for a moment,
we can intellectually so separate them.
An unhealthy work of art, on the other
53
THE SOUL OF MAN
hand, is a work whose style is obvious,
old - fashioned, and common, and whose
subject is deliberately chosen, not because
the artist has any pleasure in it, but be-
cause he thinks that the public will pay
him for it. In fact, the popular novel that
the public calls healthy is always a
thoroughly unhealthy production; and what
the public call an unhealthy novel is always
a beautiful and healthy work of art.
I need hardly say that I am not, for a
single moment, complaining that the public
and the public press misuse these words.
I do not see how, with their lack of com-
prehension of what Art is, they could pos-
sibly use them in the proper sense. I am
merely pointing out the misuse ; and as
for the origin of the misuse and the mean-
ing that lies behind it all, the explanation
is very simple. It comes from the bar-
59
THE SOUL OF MAN
barous conception of authority. It comes
from the natural inability of a com-
munity corrupted by authority to under-
stand or appreciate Individualism. In a
word, it comes from that monstrous and
ignorant thing that is called Public Opinion,
which, bad and well-meaning as it is when
it tries to control action, is infamous and
of evil meaning when it tries to control
Thought or Art.
Indeed, there is much more to be said
in favour of the physical force of the public
than there is in favour of the public's
opinion. The former may be fine. The
latter must be foolish. It is often said that
force is no argument. That, however, en-
tirely depends on what one wants to prove.
Many of the most important problems of
the last few centuries, such as the con-
tinuance of personal government in Eng-
60
THE SOUL OF MAN
land, or of feudalism in France, have been
solved entirely by means of physical force.
The very violence of a revolution may
make the public grand and splendid for
a moment. It was a fatal day when the
public discovered that the pen is mightier
than the paving-stone, and can be made
as offensive as the brickbat. They at once
sought for the journalist, found him, de-
veloped him, and made him their indus-
trious and well-paid servant. It is greatly
to be regretted, for both their sakes. Be-
hind the barricade there may be much
that is noble and heroic. But what is there
behind the leading-article but prejudice,
stupidity, cant, and twaddle ? And when
these four are joined together they make
a terrible force, and constitute the new
authority. ».
In old days men had the rack. JSTow
61
THE SOUL OF MAN
they have the press. That is an improve-
ment certainly. But still it is very bad,
and wrong, and demoralising. Somebody
— was it Burke? — called journalism the
fourth estate. That was true at the time,
no doubt. But at the present moment it
really is the only estate. It has eaten up
the other three. The Lords Temporal say
nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing
to say, and the House of Commons has
nothing to say and says it. We are domi-
nated by Journalism. In America the
President reigns for four years, and Jour-
nalism governs for ever and ever. Fortu-
nately, in America, Journalism has carried
its authority to the grossest and most brutal
extreme. As a natural consequence it has
begun to create a spirit of revolt. People
are amused by it, or disgusted by it, ac-
cording to their temperaments. But it is
62
THE SOUL OF MAN
no longer the real force it was. It is not
seriously treated. In England, Journalism,
except in a few well-known instances, not
having been carried to such excesses of
brutality, is still a great factor, a really
remarkable power. The tyranny that it
proposes to exercise over people's private
lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary.
The fact is that the public have an in-
satiable curiosity to know everything, ex-
cept what is worth knowing. Journalism,
conscious of this, and having tradesman-like
habits, supplies their demands. In cen-
turies before ours the public nailed the ears
of journalists to the pump. That was quite
hideous. In this century journalists have
nailed their own ears to the keyhole. That
is much worse. And what aggravates the
mischief is that the journalists who are most
to blame are not the amusing journalists
63
THE SOUL OF MAN
who write for what are called Society
papers. The harm is done by the serious,
thoughtful, earnest journalist, who solemnly,
as they are doing at present, will drag be-
fore the eyes of the public some incident
in the private life of a great statesman, ot
a man who is a leader of political thought
as he is a creator of political force, and
invite the public to discuss the incident, to
exercise authority in the matter, to give
their view's : and not merely to give their
views, but to carry them into action, to
dictate to the man upon all other points,
to dictate to his party, to dictate to his
country ; in fact, to make themselves
ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The
private lives of men and women should not
be told to the public. The public have
nothing to do with them at all.
In France they manage these things
THE SOUL OF MAN
better. There they do not allow the de-
tails of the trials that take place in the
divorce courts to be published for the
amusement or criticism of the public. All
that the public are allowed to know is
that the divorce has taken place and was
granted on petition of one or other or
both of the married parties concerned. In
France, in fact, they limit the journalist,
and allow the artist almost perfect freedom.
Here we allow absolute freedom to the
journalist, and entirely limit the artist.
English public opinion, that is to say, tries
to constrain and impede and warp the man
who makes things that are beautiful in
effect, and compels the journalist to retail
things that are ugly, or disgusting, or
revolting in fact, so that we have the
most serious journalists in the world,
and the most indecent newspapers. It is
05 F
THE SOUL OF MAN
no exaggeration to talk of compulsion.
There are possibly some journalists who
take a real pleasure in publishing horrible
things, or who, being poor, look to scandals
as forming a sort of permanent basis for an
income. But there are other journalists, I
feel certain, men of education and culti-
vation, who really dislike publishing these
things, who know that it is wrong to do
so, and only do it because the unhealthy
conditions under which their occupation is
carried on, oblige them to supply the public
with what the public wants, and to com-
pete with other journalists in making that
supply as full and satisfying to the gross
popular appetite as possible. It is a very
degrading position for any body of educated
men to be placed in, and I have no doubt
that most of them feel it acutely.
However, let us leave what is really a
very sordid side of the subject, and return
THE SOUL OF MAN
to the question of popular control in the
matter of Art, by which I mean Public
Opinion dictating to the artist the form
which he is to use, the mode in which he
is to use it, and the materials with which
he is to work. I have pointed out that
the arts which have escaped best in
England are the arts in which the public
have not been interested. They are, how-
ever, interested in the drama, and as a
certain advance has been made in the
drama within the last ten or fifteen years,
it is important to point out that this ad-
vance is entirely due to a few individual
artists refusing to accept the popular want
of taste as their standard, and refusing to
regard Art as a mere matter of demand
and supply. With his marvellous and
vivid personality, with a style that has
really a true colour-element in it, with his
extraordinary power, not over mere mimicry
67
THE SOUL OF MAN
but over imaginative and intellectual
creation, Mr. Irving, had his sole object
been to give the public what they wanted,
could have produced the commonest plays
in the commonest manner, and made as
much success and money as a man could
possibly desire. But his object was
not that. His object was to realise his
own perfection as an artist, under certain
conditions and in certain forms of Art.
At first he appealed to the few : now he
has educated the many. He has created
in the public both taste and temperament.
The public appreciate his artistic success
immensely. I often wonder, however,
whether the public understand that that
success is entirely due to the fact that he
did not accept their standard, but realised
his own. With their standard the Lyceum
would have been a sort of second-rate
THE SOUL OF MAN
booth, as some of the popular theatres in
London are at present Whether they
understand it or not, the fact however
remains, that taste and temperament have,
to a certain extent, been created in the
public, and that the public is capable of
developing these qualities. The problem
then is, why do not the public become
more civilised ? They have the capacity.
What stops them ?
The thing that stops them, it must be
said again, is their desire to exercise au-
thority over the artists and over works of
art. To certain theatres, such as the
Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public
seem to come in a proper mood. In both
of these theatres there have been individual
artists, who have succeeded in creating in
their audiences — and every theatre in
London has its own audience — the tern-
THE SOUL OF MAN
perament to which Art appeals. And what
is that temperament ? It is the tempera-
ment of receptivity. That is all.
If a man approaches a work of art with
any desire to exercise authority over it and
the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit
that he cannot receive any artistic im-
pression from it at all. The work of art is
to dominate the spectator : the spectator is
not to dominate the work of art. The
spectator is to be receptive. He is to be
the violin on which the master is to play.
And the more completely he can suppress
his own silly views, his own foolish pre-
judices, his own absurd ideas of what Art
should be, or should not be, the more likely
he is to understand and appreciate the work
of art in question. This is, of course, quite
obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-
going public of English men and women.
70
THE SOUL OF MAN
But it is equally true of what are called
educated people. For an educated per-
son's ideas of Art are drawn naturally from
what Art has been, whereas the new work
of art is beautiful by being what Art has
never been ; and to measure it by the
standard of the past is to measure it by a
standard on the rejection of which its real
perfection depends. A temperament cap-
able of receiving, through an imaginative
medium, and under imaginative conditions,
new and beautiful impressions, is the only
temperament that can appreciate a work of
art. And true as this is in a case of the
appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is
still more true of the appreciation of such
arts as the drama. For a picture and a
statue are not at war with Time. They
take no account of its succession. In one
moment their unity may be apprehended.
71
THE SOUL OF MAN
In the case of literature it is different.
Time must be traversed before the unity of
effect is realised. And so, in the drama,
there may occur in the first act of the play
something whose real artistic value may not
be evident to the spectator till the third or
fourth act is reached. Is the silly fellow to
get angry and call out, and disturb the play,
and annoy the artists ? No. The honest
man is to sit quietly, and know the delight-
ful emotions of wonder, curiosity, and
suspense. He is not to go to the play to
lose a vulgar temper. He is to go to the
play to realise an artistic temperament. He
is to go to the play to gain an artistic
temperament. He is not the arbiter of the
work of art. He is one who is admitted to
contemplate the work of art, and, if the
work be fine, to forget in its contemplation
all the egotism that mars him — the egotism
72
of his ignorance, or the egotism of his in-
formation. The point about the drama is
hardly, I think, sufficiently recognised. I
can quite understand that were * Macbeth '
produced for the first time before a modern
London audience, many of the people pre-
sent would strongly and vigorously object
to the introduction of the witches in the
first act, with their grotesque phrases and
their ridiculous words. But when the play
is over one realises that the laughter of the
witches in * Macbeth ' is as terrible as the
laughter of madness in * Lear,' more terrible
than the laughter of lago in the tragedy of
the Moor. No spectator of art needs a
more perfect mood of receptivity than the
spectator of a play. The moment he seeks
to exercise authority he becomes the avowed
enemy of Art and of himself. Art does not
mind. It is he who suffers.
73
THE SOUL OF MAN
With the novel it is the same thing.
Popular authority and the recognition of
popular authority are fatal. Thackeray's
' Esmond ' is a beautiful work of art be-
cause he wrote it to please himself. In his
other novels, in ' Pendennis,' in ' Philip,' in
* Vanity Fair ' even, at times, he is too
conscious of the public, and spoils his work
by appealing directly to the sympathies of
the public, or by directly mocking at them.
A true artist takes no notice whatever of
the public. The public are to him non-
existent. He has no poppied or honeyed
cakes through which to give the monster
sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to
the popular novelist. One incomparable
novelist we have now in England, Mr.
George Meredith. There are better artists
in France, but France has no one whose
view of life is so large, so varied, so imagin-
74
THE SOUL OF MAN
atively true. There are tellers of stories in
Russia who have a more vivid sense of what
pain in fiction may be. But to him belongs
philosophy in fiction. His people not merely
live, but they live in thought. One can see
them from myriad points of view. They are
suggestive. There is soul in them and
around them. They are interpretative and
symbolic. And he who made them, those
wonderful quickly-moving figures, made
them for his own pleasure, and has never
asked the public what they wanted, has never
cared to know what they wanted, has never
allowed the public to dictate to him or in-
fluence him in any way, but has gone on in-
tensifying his own personality, and pro-
ducing his own individual work. At first
none came to him. That did not matter.
Then the few came to him. That did not
change him. The many have come now.
75
THE SOUL T)F MAN
He is still the same. He is an incompar-
able novelist.
With the decorative arts it is not dif-
ferent. The public clung with really
pathetic tenacity to what 1 believe were
the direct traditions of the Great Exhibition
of international vulgarity, traditions that
were so appalling that the houses in which
people lived were only fit for blind people
to live in. Beautiful things began to be
made, beautiful colours came from the
dyer's hand, beautiful patterns from the
artist's brain, and the use of beautiful things
and their value and importance were set
forth. The public were really very indig-
nant. They lost their temper. They said
silly things. No one minded. No one was
a whit the worse. No one accepted the
authority of public opinion. And now it
is almost impossible to enter any modern
76
THE SOUL OF MAN
house without seeing some recognition of
good taste, some recognition of the value
of lovely surroundings, some sign of appre-
ciation of beauty. In fact, people's houses
are, as a rule, quite charming nowadays.
People have been to a very great extent
civilised. It is only fair to state, however,
that the extraordinary success of the revo-
lution in ho use -decoration and furniture and
the like has not really been due to the ma-
jority of the public developing a very fine
taste in such matters. It has been chiefly
due to the fact that the craftsmen of things
so appreciated the pleasure of making what
was beautiful, and woke to such a vivid
consciousness of the hideousness and vul-
garity of what the public had previously
wanted, that they simply starved the public
out. It would be quite impossible at the
present moment to furnish a room as rooms
77
THE SOUL OF MAN
were furnished a few years ago, without
going for everything to an auction of
second-hand furniture from some third-rate
lodging-house. The things are no longer
made. However they may object to it,
people must nowadays have something
charming in their surroundings. Fortu-
nately for them, their assumption of autho-
rity in these art-matters came to entire
grief.
It is evident, then, that all authority in
such things is bad. People sometimes in-
quire what form of government is most
suitable for an artist to live under. To
this question there is only one answer.
The form of government that is most
suitable to the artist is no government at
all. Authority over him and his art is
ridiculous. It has been stated that under
despotisms artists have produced lovely
78
THE SOUL OF MAN
work. This is not quite so. Artists have
visited despots, not as subjects to be tyran-
nised over, but as wandering wonder-makers,
as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be
entertained and charmed and suffered to be
at peace, and allowed to create. There is
this to be said in favour of the despot, that
he, being an individual, may have culture,
while the mob, being a monster, has none.
One who is an Emperor and King may
stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter,
but when the democracy stoops down it is
merely to throw mud. And yet the de-
mocracy have not so far to stoop as the
emperor. In fact, when they want to throw
mud they have not to stoop at all. But
there is no necessity to separate the monarch
from the mob ; all authority is equally bad.
There are three kinds of despots. There
is the despot who tyrannises over the body.
79
THE SOUL OF MAN
There is the despot who tyrannises over the
soul. There is the despot who tyrannises
over the soul and body alike. The first is
called the Prince. The second is called
the Pope. The third is called the People.
The Prince may be cultivated. Many
Princes have been. Yet in the Prince
there is danger. One thinks of Dante at
the bitter feast in Verona, of Tasso in
Ferrara's madman's cell. It is better for
the artist not to live with Princes. The
Pope may be cultivated. Many Popes have
been ; the bad Popes have been. The bad
Popes loved Beauty, almost as passionately,
nay, with as much passion as the good
Popes hated Thought. To the wickedness
of the Papacy humanity owes much. The
goodness of the Papacy owes a terrible debt
to humanity. Yet, though the Vatican has
kept the rhetoric of its thunders, and lost
80
THE SOUL OF MAN
the rod of its lightning, it is better for the
artist not to live with Popes. It was a
Pope who said of Cellini to a conclave of
Cardinals that common laws and common
authority were not made for men such as
he; but it was a Pope who thrust Cellini
into prison, and kept him there till he
sickened with rage, and created unreal
visions for himself, and saw the gilded sun
enter his room, and grew so enamoured of
it that he sought to escape, and crept out
from tower to tower, and falling through
dizzy air at dawn, maimed himself, and was
by a vine-dresser covered with vine leaves,
and carried in a cart to one who, loving
beautiful things, had care of him. There
is danger in Popes. And as for the People,
what of them and their authority ? Per-
haps of them and their authority one has
spoken enough. Their authority is a thing
81 G
THE SOUL OF MAN
blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic,
amusing, serious, and obscene. It is im-
possible for the artist to live with the
People. All despots bribe. The People
bribe and brutalise. Who told them to
exercise authority ? They were made to
live, to listen, and to love. Someone has
done them a great wrong. They have
marred themselves by imitation of their in-
feriors. They have taken the sceptre of the
Prince. How should they use it ? They
have taken the triple tiara of the Pope.
How should they carry its burden ? They
are as a clown whose heart is broken. They
are as a priest whose soul is not yet born.
Let all who love Beauty pity them. Though
they themselves love not Beauty, yet let
them pity themselves. Who taught them
the trick of tyranny?
There are many other things that one
82
THE SOUL OF MAN
might point out. One might point out how
the Renaissance was great, because it sought
to solve no social problem, and busied itself
not about such things, but suffered the
individual to develop freely, beautifully,
and naturally, and so had great and in-
dividual artists, and great and individual
men. One might point out how Louis XIV.,
by creating the modern state, destroyed the
individualism of the artist, and made things
monstrous in their monotony of repetition,
and contemptible in their conformity to
rule, and destroyed throughout all France
all those fine freedoms of expression that
had made tradition new in beauty, and new
modes one with antique form. But the
past is of no importance. The present is
of no importance. It is with the future
that we have to deal. For the past is what
man should not have been. The present is
83
THE SOUL OF MAN
what man ought not to be. The future is
what artists are.
It will, of course, be said that such a
scheme as is set forth here is quite un-
practical, and goes against human nature.
This is perfectly true. It is unpractical,
and it goes against human nature. This is
why it is worth carrying out, and that is
why one proposes it. For what is a
practical scheme ? A practical scheme is
either a scheme that is already in existence,
or a scheme that could be carried out under
existing conditions. But it is exactly the
existing conditions that one objects to ; and
any scheme that could accept these con-
ditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions
will be done away with, and human nature
will change. The only thing that one really
knows about human nature is that it
changes. Change is the one quality we
84
THE SOUL OF MAN
can predicate of it. The systems that fail
are those that rely on the permanency of
human nature, and not on its growth and
development. The error of Louis XIV.
was that he thought human nature would
always be the same. The result of his error
was the French Revolution. It was an
admirable result. All the results of
the mistakes of governments are quite
admirable.
It is to be noted that Individualism
does not come to the man with any sickly
cant about duty, which merely means doing
what other people want because they want
it ; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice,
which is merely a survival of savage
mutilation. In fact, it does not come to
a man with any claims upon him at all. It
comes naturally and inevitably out of man.
It is the point to which all development
85
THE SOUL OF MAN
tends. It is the differentiation to which all
organisms grow. It is the perfection that
is inherent in every mode of life, and
towards which every mode of life quickens.
And so Individualism exercises no com-
pulsion over man. On the contrary, it
says to man that he should suffer no
compulsion to be exercised over him. It
does not try to force people to be good. It
knows that people are good when they are
let alone. Man will develop Individualism
out of himself. Man is now so developing
Individualism. To ask whether Indivi-
dualism is practical is like asking whether
Evolution is practical. Evolution is the
law of life, and there is no evolution
except towards individualism. Where this
tendency is not expressed, it is a case of
artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or
of death.
86
THE SOUL OF MAN
Individualism will also be unselfish and
unaffected. It has been pointed out that
one of the results of the extraordinary
tyranny of authority is that words are
absolutely distorted from their proper and
simple meaning, and are used to express
the obverse of their right signification.
What is true about Art is true about Life.
A man is called affected, nowadays, if he
dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing
that he is acting in a perfectly natural
manner. Affectation, in such matters,
consists in dressing according to the views
of one's neighbour, whose views, as they
are the views of the majority, will probably
be extremely stupid. Or a man is called
selfish if he lives in the manner that seems
to him most suitable for the full realisation
of his own personality; if, in fact, the
primary aim of his life is self-development.
87
THE SOUL OF MAN
But this is the way in which everyone
should live. Selfishness is not living as one
wishes to live, it is asking others to live as
one wishes to live. And unselfishness is
letting other people's lives alone, not
interfering with them. Selfishness always
aims at creating around it an absolute
uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises
infinite variety of type as a delightful thing,
accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is
not selfish to think for oneself. A man who
does not think for himself does not think at
all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's
neighbour that he should think in the same
way, and hold the same opinions. \Vhy
should he ? If he can think, he will probably
think differently. If he cannot think, it is
monstrous to require thought of any kind
from him. A red rose is not selfish because
it wants to be a red rose. It would be
THE SOUL OF MAN
horribly selfish if it wanted all the other
flowers in the garden to be both red and
roses. Under Individualism people will be
quite natural and absolutely unselfish, and
will know the meanings of the words, and
realise them in their free, beautiful lives.
Nor will men be egotistic as they are now.
For the egotist is he who makes claims
upon others, and the Individualist will not
desire to do that. It will not give him
pleasure. When man has realised Indi-
vidualism, he will also realise sympathy and
exercise it freely and spontaneously. Up to
the present man has hardly cultivated sym-
pathy at all. He has merely sympathy with
pain, and sympathy with pain is not the
highest form of sympathy. All sympathy
is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the
least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism.
It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a
THE SOUL OF MAN
certain element of terror for our own safety.
We become afraid that we ourselves might
be as the leper or as the blind, and that no
man would have care of us. It is curiously
limiting, too. One should sympathise with
the entirety of life, not with life's sores and
maladies merely, but with life's joy and
beauty and energy and health and freedom.
The wider sympathy is, of course, the more
difficult. It requires more unselfishness.
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings
of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature
— it requires, in fact, the nature of a true
Individualist — to sympathise with a friend's
success.
In the modern stress of competition
and struggle for place, such sympathy is
naturally rare, and is also very much stifled
by the immoral ideal of uniformity of type
and conformity to rule which is so prevalent
90
THE SOUL OF MAN
everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious
in England.
Sympathy with pain there will, of
course, always be. It is one of the first
instincts of man. The animals which are
individual, the higher animals, that is to say,
share it with us. But it must be re-
membered that while sympathy with joy
intensifies the sum of joy in the world,
sympathy with pain does not really diminish
the amount of pain. It may make man
better able to endure evil, but the evil
remains. Sympathy with consumption does
not cure consumption ; that is what Science
does. And when Socialism has solved the
problem of poverty, and Science solved
the problem of disease, the area of the
sentimentalists will be lessened, and the
sympathy of man will be large, healthy,
and spontaneous. Man will have joy in
91
THE SOUL OF MAN
the contemplation of the joyous life of
others.
For it is through joy that the In-
dividualism of the future will develop itself.
Christ made no attempt to reconstruct
society, and consequently the Individualism
that he preached to man could be realised
only through pain or in solitude. The ideals
that we owe to Christ are the ideals of the
man who abandons society entirely, or of the
man who resists society absolutely. But
man is naturally social. Even the Thebaid
became peopled at last. And though the
cenobite realises his personality, it is often
an impoverished personality that he so
realises. Upon the other hand, the terrible
truth that pain is a mode through which
man may realise himself exercises a won-
derful fascination over the world. Shallow
speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and
92
THE SOUL OF MAN
on platforms often talk about the world's
worship of pleasure, and whine against it.
But it is rarely in the world's history that
its ideal has been one of joy and beauty.
The worship of pain has far more often
dominated the world. Medievalism, with
its saints and martyrs, its love of self-
torture, its wild passion for wounding itself,
its gashing with knives, and its whipping
with rods — Medievalism is real Christianity,
and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.
When the Renaissance dawned upon the
world, and brought with it the new ideals
of the beauty of life and the joy of living,
men could not understand Christ. Even
Art shows us that. The painters of the
Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy
playing with another boy in a palace or a
garden, or lying back in his mother's arms,
smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright
93
THE SOUL OF MAN
bird ; or as a noble, stately figure moving
nobly through the world ; or as a wonderful
figure rising in a sort of ecstasy from death
to life. Even when they drew him crucified
they drew him as a beautiful God on whom
evil men had inflicted suffering. But he
did not preoccupy them much. What
delighted them was to paint the men and
women whom they admired, and to show
the loveliness of this lovely earth. They
painted many religious pictures — in fact,
they painted far too many, and the
monotony of type and motive is weari-
some, and was bad for art. It was the
result of the authority of the public in art-
matters, and is to be deplored. But their
soul was not in the subject. Raphael was a
great artist when he painted his portrait
of the Pope. When he painted his
Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not
94
THE SOUL OF MAN
a great artist at all. Christ had no message
for the Renaissance, which was wonderful
because it brought an ideal at variance with
his, and to find the presentation of the
real Christ we must go to mediaeval art.
There he is one maimed and marred ; one
who is not comely to look on, because
Beauty is a joy ; one who is not in fair
raiment, because that may be a joy also :
he is a beggar who has a marvellous soul ;
he is a leper whose soul is divine ; he needs
neither property nor health ; he is a God
realising his perfection through pain.
The evolution of man is slow. The
injustice of men is great. It was necessary
that pain should be put forward as a mode
of self-realisation. Even now, in some
places in the world, the message of Christ
is necessary. No one who lived in modern
Russia could possibly realise his perfection
95
THE SOUL OF MAN
except by pain. A few Russian artists
have realised themselves in Art ; in a fiction
that is mediaeval in character, because its
dominant note is the realisation of men
through suffering. But for those who
are not artists, and to whom there is no
mode of life but the actual life of fact,
pain is the only door to perfection. A
Russian who lives happily under the present
system of government in Russia must either
believe that man has no soul, or that, if
he has, it is not worth developing. A
Nihilist who rejects all authority be-
cause he knows authority to be evil, and
welcomes all pain, because through that
he realises his personality, is a real
Christian. To him the Christian ideal is
a true thing.
And yet, Christ did not revolt against
authority. He accepted the imperial au-
96
THE SOUL OF MAN
thority of the Roman Empire and paid
tribute. He endured the ecclesiastical
authority of the Jewish Church, and would
not repel its violence by any violence of his
own. He had, as I said before, no scheme
for the reconstruction of society. But the
modern world has schemes. It proposes to
do away with poverty and the suffering that
it entails. It desires to get rid of pain, and
the suffering that pain entails. It trusts to
Socialism and to Science as its methods.
What it aims at is an Individualism express-
ing itself through joy. This Individualism
will be larger, fuller, lovelier than any In-
dividualism has ever been. Pain is not the
ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely
provisional and a protest. It has reference
to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings.
When the wrong, and the disease, and the
injustice are removed, it will have no
97 H
THE SOUL OF MAN
further place. It was a great work, but it
is almost over. Its sphere lessens every
day.
Nor will man miss it. For what man
has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor
pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought
to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he
can do so without exercising restraint on
others, or suffering it ever, and his activities
are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner,
healthier, more civilised, more himself.
Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of ap-
proval. When man is happy, he is in
harmony with himself and his environment.
The new Individualism, for whose service
Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is
working, will be perfect harmony. It will
be what the Greeks sought for, but could
not, except in Thought, realise completely,
because they had slaves, and fed them; it
THE SOUL OF MAN
will be what the Renaissance sought for,
but could not realise completely except in
Art, because they had slaves, and starved
them. It will be complete, and through it
each man will attain to his perfection. The
new Individualism is the new Hellenism.
University of California
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